Melbourne writer wins regional Commonwealth Prize

Melbourne writer Steven Carroll has won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Southeast Asia and the South Pacific for The Time We Have Taken, a novel about life in 1970s Australia.

Carroll also was included on the long list for the Miles Franklin Award, Australia's most prestigious writers' prize, released Thursday.

The Commonwealth Foundation announces a best novel and best first novel in English in each of four geographic regions of the world. Those books compete for the final prize, to be announced May 18.

Karen Foxlee won the regional award for best first book for The Anatomy of Wings about the disintegration of a family after a suicide.

Regional winners for Canada and Caribbean are to be announced later on Thursday.

Carroll's The Time We Have Taken is the third of a series of novels he has written about a working-class family in a Melbourne suburb.

"Few things are more universal than the intensely regional," Carroll told the Sydney Morning Herald.

"This series of novels all deal with the birth and growth of a suburb nine miles north of Melbourne. I think this is the best one: I was able to tie together a lot of themes about yearning and the moment."

Other candidates for the Miles Franklin Award include British writer Nicolas Shakespeare and Janette Turner Hospital, an Australian-born writer who spent many years in Canada.

The $38,900 Cdn award is for books about life in Australia, thus Shakespeare's novel set in Tasmania, Secrets of the Sea, qualifies.

Other finalists:

• Landscape Of Farewell by Alex Miller.
• Love Without Hope by Rodney Hall.
• Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital.
• Sorry by Gail Jones.
• The Fern Tattoo by David Brooks.
• The Memory Room by Christopher Koch.
• The Widow And Her Hero by Tom Keneally.